


glory hallelujah days

by patrokla



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Gen, M/M, Panic Attacks, Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 23:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6828622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it's so good to be around Carl that it's almost unbearable.</p>
<p>Or, a look at the Libertines through the Anthems for Doomed Youth era.</p>
            </blockquote>





	glory hallelujah days

**Author's Note:**

> I've just written this in the last hour and given it the most basic of editing, so if it disappears mysteriously in the night it's because I've come to my senses and taken it down for some reworking. 
> 
> Title from - well, you know.

**early 2014**  
  
It’s so good, so unutterably, unbearably good to be around Carl again that sometimes, sometimes Peter can’t bear it. Can’t bear to look at him, ten years older and rougher and a little wiser and as radiant as the sun, a dark-haired Apollo who looks at Peter with pale blue eyes and smiles a crooked, slow smile. He’s hesitant, maybe, to open up again, but Peter knows him and knows that he left a piece of himself in Carl long ago, a shard of heart and heartbreak, and Carl’s lived with that feeling for so long that letting Peter in completely can’t help but feel natural when it happens - and it will happen. 

  
**late 2014**  
  
Thailand is grey, grey, splashes of color but mostly dark and the air smells like his sweat, the mattress is soaked through with it, and when the man-in-white-coat comes in he reaches out a hand for - something, anything to stop this purge. To speed it up. He wants a hit more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life, but some tiny, malnourished voice in his head says that there’s an end, that there is something beyond this in sight and he can almost see it, he’s almost there, the grey is turning to blue and he can-

  
**early 2015**  
  
John is the most hesitant of them all, when it comes to outward appearances, and Peter thinks it’s ridiculous at first, thinks John fucked off to Denmark and had to deal with a lot less of Peter slagging him off in the papers every month than Carl or Gary ever had to.   
  
It takes a while to remember how he and John had been, all those years ago. In the in-between, quiet times of being The Libertines, when he’d made John laugh, laugh ’til he cried. John was lost the second he opened his door and looked down to find Peter there, and for all his outward stoicism he was a soft heart, a soft touch, a boy with distant parents looking for someone who could make him feel like the centre of the world.   
  
And Peter had done that, from time to time. Mostly unknowingly, he’d thought then, but now he looks back and sees traces of connivance. Especially in those later, fraught, taut with tension days. Wanted someone on his side, when Carl seemed to have abandoned it. And John was perfect for that, would stand up to Carl just because Peter could make him smile.   
  
Of course it’s all changed now. John removed himself from the equation and came back a different figure, like they all had (except Gary, maybe, who’d always been the oldest and steadiest, had always loved him enough to tell him off). Now, John smiles for other reasons that have nothing to do with any of them, and perhaps that’s good, perhaps that’s how they should all be, but sometimes Peter looks at John, standing on his own on the side of the studio, and thinks of how Carl had to call him again and again, tell him that it was for real this time, that it could, maybe, possibly, be for real. For a few seconds at least, it could be for real.  
  
And John had listened, and it was for real, but Peter has to try twice as hard to make John smile now and he knows, knows, that it won’t ever be the same. 

  
**mid 2015**

  
1) Improbably, nigh on impossibly, they finish recording the album. A third Libertines album. Peter believed it was less possible than even the press did; at some point he’d realized that he’d fucked his boy over too many times to expect a return. He was owed one, yes, Carl made his own fair share of the mistakes, yes, but. Peter has learned very little in the last ten years, but he has learned to push aside his own hurt and bitterness just long enough to see past it - to see Carl on a stage singing to Peter whilst his replacement bounced and played in the background, and to know that however much it seemed wrong to Peter, it was just as wrong to Carl, too. 

  
2) The press is as it always was and will be, and Peter loves and hates it in almost equal measure, most days, but sometimes someone will put a mic in front of Carl’s face and ask him if this is it, if they’ll be together always after this, and Peter feels like the wide-eyed, feral youth he once was, somewhere in between the initial jump and the inevitable crumpled crash-landing. Wants to wrap Carl up and press his cheek to Carl’s, tell him that the world can go fuck itself, because all they need is each other. Not their prying questions that remind Carl this might not be trustworthy, lasting, anywhere close to permanent.   
  
And yet. And yet, he wants the answer too, he leans in just as close as any journo when the question is asked, looks at Carl with nothing in his eyes but dual challenges to tell the truth, to tell Peter what he wants to hear. That the two may not, and often are not one and the same, is not at all something he wants to remember.

  
  
3) And so it goes, the machine picking up speed, arenas selling out, and it’s good, it’s great, Carl looks at him and smiles with nothing held back, holds him like there were never any years or words that separated them.   
  
Peter hasn’t touched anything he shouldn’t in months and months, and the want doesn’t leave but it has receded to a low hum, like tinnitus that’s bearable if you don’t think about it. Carl is proud of him, Katia is proud of him, his mother called and cried with happiness and relief, and it’s so good, and it’s too much.  
  
It’s too much, and the night he breaks is a night they have a gig, of course, and he can see his phone on the corner of the hotel bed, lighting up endlessly with calls and texts from them all. He can picture their faces: Carl - bitter, angry at himself for trusting, angry at Peter for disappointing; Gary - smiling flatly, the way he does when everything is fucked and the only thing to do is get through it and lock the doors of the bus so Peter can’t get back on; John - stoic, blank, no real hope to be crushed, but a tiny sprout that dared to poke above the soil has been ground back down into the dirt by Peter’s absent heel.   
  
Peter, the absent heel himself, is curled around a pillow on the bed breathing very fast, and then not at all, and fast again, and the world is a spinning wheel of blurry disappointment and good times he doesn’t remember and the flash of a camera as he goes anywhere, does anything, as he walks to the police car while the headlines of Yet Another Jail Sentence for Pete Doherty, Junkie, are printed on a thousand newspapers.   
  
He knows that he should be somewhere, had commitments, obligations, responsibilities, but the only places he’s ever felt safe are in the arms of people surrounded by everything that terrifies him.   
  
(that tiny voice in his head that’s grown stronger is proud, proud, proud, because he might’ve fucked it up, but not irreparably, because he didn’t go back to that, did he, no he hasn’t, and once they figure out where he is they’ll be proud too, please, they have to see how good this is)

  
**early 2016**  
  
When Carl asks him where they should record the next album (“Not now, but early next year, I was thinking? After yours, yeah?”) he cries. He can’t help it, because a battle, and possibly a whole war, has been won. They have a future again, as Carl and Peter, as the Libertines, as bright, close stars in each others skies.   
  
He’s done so much with Carl over the last year, on national television, on arena stages, in private rooms where no fan, no camera is anywhere to be seen, but when he embraces Carl now, it’s without care for prior hesitations, prior mistakes, prior actions - because the future stretches out wide and bright ahead of them, and the past might be dirty and narrow, but it is behind them. Peter is there, finally, he is there. The sun is rising, the sky is lightening, and Carl’s hand is in his as they step forward, together, into the morning.


End file.
